Book Details

Book Description

Oracle Solaris provides innovative, built-in features that deliver breakthrough high availability, advanced security, efficiency, and industry-leading scalability and performance to help businesses grow.

"Oracle Solaris 11: First Look" covers the new features and functionality of Oracle Solaris 11 and how these new features and improvements will make it easier to deploy services to the enterprise while improving performance and reducing total cost of ownership.

This book starts with coverage of Image Packaging System and the new installation methods. It then moves swiftly to network configuration. The book also includes some security features and improvements.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: IPS – The Image Packaging System

The brave new world of IPS

Repositories/repos

Package naming schemes

Overview of package and patch installation

Practical examples of pkg command usage

Dealing with repositories

Package updates and patching

Summary

Chapter 2: Solaris 11 Installation Methods

It's the Oracle of install systems!

Default passwords

Installation from CD-ROM

Overview of how AI install works

Network bootstrap process details

Setting up a local install server with installadm

Common traps and pitfalls

Solaris 11 release version versus support version

Summary

Chapter 3: Sysadmin Configuration Differences

Welcome to the new normal

Host identity: the sysconfig command

Driver configuration: /etc/driver/drv

Network address configuration: ipadm and dladm

Wireless configuration: Stick to the GUI if you can

Miscellaneous differences in system-level configuration

Summary

Chapter 4: Networking Nuts and Bolts

Networking re-architected

Orientation to new Solaris 11 networking

Interface naming and IP labels

NWAM – NetWork AutoMagic

IPMP – IP multipathing

Link aggregation

VNIC – Virtual NIC

VLAN tagging

IP tunneling

Bridging

Network resource management

Other changes

Summary

Chapter 5: NWAM – Networking Auto-reconfiguration

What is NWAM and how you can use it

Summary

Chapter 6: ZFS – Now You Can't Ignore It!

ZFS – your future, today

ZFS root – no more UFS

ZFS booting and beadm

ZFS, beadm, and zones

Deduplication now possible

ZFS encryption

ZFS diff between snapshots

Miscellaneous changes and improvements

Summary

Chapter 7: Zones in Solaris 11

Taking things to the next zone

New zone utilities

New zone capabilities

Fast zone creation via clone

Automatic Network Interfaces – the anet resource

Preconfiguring zones

Immutable zones

Summary

Chapter 8: Security Improvements

Keeping the horse in the barn

Mandatory auditing

Immutable zones

ProFTPd is the new FTP server

Sudo privileged access tool

Direct root use now blocked by default

Fine-grained RBAC privileges

On-disk encryption

Summary

Chapter 9: Miscellaneous

What's in this chapter anyway?

Virtual consoles, also known as virtual terminals, are back

Fast reboot

CUPS printing

Power management

Notifications triggered by SMF state transitions

Trusted Solaris extras

COMSTAR and iSCSI

Summary

What You Will Learn

Understand the new Solaris packaging system

Master the role of zones in Solaris 11 with some new utilities, new features, and some mandatory differences in basic setup and usage

Get started with some security features and improvements

Discover features of the ZFS file system in Solaris 11

Authors

Philip P. Brown

Philip P. Brown was introduced to computers at the early age of 10, by a Science teacher at St. Edmund's College, Ware, UK. He was awestruck by the phenomenal power of the ZX81's 3 MHz, Z80 CPU, and 1 K of RAM, showcasing the glory of 64 x 48 monochrome block graphics! The impressionable lad promptly went out and spent his life savings to acquire one of his very own, and then spent many hours keying in small BASIC programs such as "Ark Royal", a game where you land a block pretending to be an aircraft, on a bunch of lower blocks pretending to be an aircraft carrier. Heady stuff!
When birthday money allowed expanding the ZX81 to an unbelievable 16 K of RAM, he also felt the need to acquire a patch cable to allow him to actually save programs to audio cassettes. Once this was deployed to the family cassette recorder, he was not seen or heard from for many months that followed.
Phil's first exposure to Sun Microsystems was at U.C. Berkeley in 1989, as part of standard computer science classwork. Students were expected to do their classwork on diskless Sun 3/50 workstations running SunOS 4.1.1. During this time, he wrote his first serious freeware program, "kdrill", which at one time was part of the official X11 distribution, and remains in some Linux distros to this day. He eventually acquired a Sun workstation for personal use (with a disk and quarter-inch tape drive) and continued his home explorations, eventually transitioning from SunOS
to Solaris, around Solaris 2.5.1.
The principles of the original, pre-GPL freeware licenses prevalent in 1989 inspired Phil the most. Led by their example, he has contributed to an assortment of free software projects along the way. A little-known fact is that he is responsible for "MesaGL" morphing into the modern GLX/OpenGL implementation it is known for today. At the time, MesaGL was primarily an OpenGL workalike with a separate, non-X11 API, as author Brian Paul did not believe that it could function in a speed-effective way. In 2003, Phil wrote the first GLX integration proof-of-concept code, which convinced Brian to eventually commit to true GLX extension support.
In 2002, Phil created pkg-get, inspired by Debian's apt-get utility, and started off CSW packaging. This, at last, brought the era of network-installed packages to Solaris. All major public Solaris package repositories prior to Solaris 11 still use pkg-get format catalogs for their software.
In reality, Phil also had an impact on the existence of Solaris itself. In 2002, Sun Microsystems was on the road to canceling Solaris x86 as a product line. The community was outraged, and a vote in the old "solarisonintel" Yahoo! group resulted in six community representatives making the case for x86 to Sun. Phil was one of those six who eventually flew to Sun HQ to meet the head honchos
and banish the forces of evil for a while.
Phil's current hobbies include writing (both articles and code), riding motorcycles, reading historical fiction, and keeping his children amused.
The Solaris-specific part of his website is http://www.bolthole.com/solaris.
Most of his writing until this point has been done online, for free. His website has a particular wealth of Solaris information, and includes a mix of script writing, driver code, and Solaris sysadmin resources.
As far as books go, he was only a prepublication reviewer for Solaris Systems Programming, Rich Teer. However, the first time any of his articles got published was in Rainbow magazine (a publication for the Tandy Color Computer) on page 138 of the May 1989 issue, under a column named Tools for Programming BASIC09 (http://ia700809.us.archive.org/26/items/rainbowmagazine-1989-05/The_Rainbow_Magazine_05_1989_text.pdf).

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